STEVE GRIFFITHS – SOME BIOGRAPHY

 

Steve Griffiths was born in Trearddur Bay, Anglesey, in 1949.

 

He spent his childhood on the beaches and cliffs around Trearddur Bay, not knowing that 35 years earlier one R.S.Thomas was getting his feet wet in the same pools.     At the age of 11, he moved to Amlwch, the origin of al-Chwm in his new work An Elusive State.     After reading English at Cambridge at the end of the Sixties, he began a working life engaged with the consequences of, and some solutions to, poverty,  inequality and poor health, first as a welfare rights worker in London, later as a researcher and consultant in social and health policy, in the last twelve years working freelance all over Britain for local and national government, health bodies, and charities. This commitment has often squeezed out the poetry; but the quarrel between landscapes has also certainly created a defining tension in his work. He has constantly returned to the scene of his childhood for renewal.   Though he is an ‘expert’ on social conditions in London, he’s admitted to himself that he still sees the place from the outside, as a boy who grew up on a beach.   He was Vice-Chair of the Welsh Academy (English section) at the beginning of the Nineties, and is a Fellow of Academi. 

 

He has published six collections of poems since 1980, with a gap between Selected Poems (Seren, 1993) (read a poem from it by clicking here), and An Elusive State – Entering al-Chwm (Cinnamon, 2008).

 

Steve has a large body of uncollected new work, mostly lyrical and playful poems of renewal written during 2006/8.  Some appeared in Poetry Wales in April 2007, others in The Rialto.   

 

See www.academi.org/writers-of-wales for more about the writers of Wales.